


Never noticed the rain

by cicak



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Mutants, Boat Sex, Boat mechanic Will, Cannibalism, Fucking in a boat, Its not an X-Men crossover really, M/M, Mutant Rights, Summer Holidays, Surgeon Hannibal, idyllic villages and murder, was the entire point of this story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 06:13:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1458940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will's a boat mechanic in the gulf of Mexico who understands people perfectly, and is destined to become the wise old boat captain once time catches up with him. Hannibal is the former surgeon on sabbatical with no innate understanding of human nature. Together, they have a summer romance, in amongst the bodies. (Mutant AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never noticed the rain

It is impossible to describe the beauty of the coast without using the language of embellishment. The geography of the region dots towns along the coast like pearls a giant could dive for, and stumbling upon one always feels like a treat put in place for your eyes alone. A perfect ribbon of sand fringes a natural harbour, the quiet susurrus of the tide, turns on the moon’s signal to genteelly to bob the little boats back into shore, where the sun glinting off their outboard motors is the only hint that you hadn’t travelled back to a more primitive time.

 

Will Graham was a new man in town, which in the context of the town means anyone who had arrived between the last week and when they entered puberty. He’d actually been there a couple of years, taking over the existing mechanic’s shop by the shore and slowly building up his own clientele, focusing mainly on fixing boat engines, but slowly making his name as someone who could fix the little other mechanical pieces that go wrong in a life but are still mendable. Within time he had a reputation for fixing anything he put his mind to.

He kept himself to himself, walked his dogs on the beach and lived in a few rooms in a run down house that pareidolia made to have eyes that looked out onto the bay.

The women in town frequently muttered ‘bless his heart’, as southern ladies tend to do. Others, those who were less polite and took their engines to Bob two towns over, muttered to bless his soul, because everyone knew what he was, even if they were too polite to actually talk about it to his face, and too aware to say much else.

He was a quiet man, not really much for talking. He didn’t have a wife, or a husband, or children as far as anyone could tell. He had come from the city to live a quieter life, and he seemed content to have it.

 

* * *

 

The first murders in fifty years came to the bay on the turning tide of the vernal equinox.

 

Word spread through the town like wildfire, until everyone was talking about it before the heat spread through the day. Police streamed into the bay like a line of ants, setting up a cordoned area and blocking off the rubbernecking early-season tourists and concerned locals. Will didn’t see the body, made sure to take himself out of town to get a note from the sympathetic doctor that he could present to the police captain and, after a slightly inappropriate interview then made the best effort to keep himself far away from it as he possibly could, living and working so near the shore.

It was his buddy Dave who found her. She was a local, one of them, someone Will only knew tangentially through the grapevine as the waitress in one of the nicer restaurants. The girl’s long hair emerged from the sea tangled with the algae green rope that tied the buoys together, her body draped in a toga of putrid seaweed. She should have looked like a mermaid, but instead she looked like part of the ecosystem of crud that tangles around the buoys in the harbour. Her body was violated by the sea, mutilated by the spring tides until there was not much to her but pieces of a former life. They pulled her out and confiscated the buoys, but all evidence was long-ago washed away and even the criminologists struggled to identify which wounds were from the murderer and which were from being in the push-pull of the ocean currents. The police were at a loss, she had no acrimonious ex-boyfriends, she was powered but only barely, and generally was an uncontroversial girl in the town. The police hung around in the harbour for three days before shaking their heads, giving a statement to the lingering press and taking her body away from the sea.

 

And on the night it ended, Dave told Will everything over beers. He was insistent: insistent on paying, insisting on filling Will in, and insisting on continuing even though he knew what Will was, and Will knew he could see the terror in his eyes. He saw them himself, reflected in the bottom of the glass.

And so a month later, when Will still couldn’t blink without seeing her dead eyes behind his or breathe the cold spring air without feeling the seaweed choking her and the frigid morning water burn in her lungs even though he’d never seen them in the flesh, he went down to the marina and punched Dave in the mouth, closed his shop for the afternoon and took himself to the doctor in the next town, hands clenched on the steering wheel so hard they went white.

 

The doctor’s room was the height of discretion, curved wood and separate waiting booths that kept everyone at a respectable distance from each other, to avoid contamination and adverse interactions between the different powers that could be present at any time. It was a crude solution, but one proven by experience.

 

Despite the rumours and the stern notes in his file, Will _could_ Practice Proactive Care, as the leaflets intone at him from their nicotine stained caddy. How to recognise signs, how to put up walls, and how to make sure that you don’t hurt yourself as well as others. How to be a functioning member of society. Adverts for self-help books, some old enough to be endorsed by Professor Xavier himself, lined the walls in among the glossy, wipe clean signs encouraging the use of hand sanitiser and turning up to appointments on time. He’d read them a thousand times, in identical well designed waiting rooms of expensive specialists, while the staff look at him out the sides of their eyes like he was simultaneously highly contagious and on the edge of expiring.

 

Perception and context is the key to his life. When people see Will fix an engine they think he’s a technopath, because people are so unused to seeing actual expertise that it is indistinguishable from magic. When they see him on the edge of a room looking wary they might think him shy or suffering from some other human affliction. They are unlikely to see him curled up in bed, inside a cocoon of his own making, begging and praying that it all stop. He dreads to think what they would say if they did.

 

Will’s life could have gone down many paths, but he does consider himself lucky he went to a school that thought that a person’s entire life doesn’t need to be dictated by the little quirk of their genetics. He had offers from schools that took mutants and made them into powerful, worthy citizens, protected and helpful within both mutant and non-mutant society. A scout came and spoke of famous names from the recent past and that evening’s news broadcasts, speaking of how he could also grow up to be a role model to other little boys like himself. His parents were keen for him to go, the schools all being famous and well placed to give him a role, a purpose, but he insisted that he didn’t want that. The stares and stress from being a mutant had made a deep impression on him even at a young age, but at least the disappointment in his parent’s projections worked with their accepting facial expressions to not be too upsetting.

 

The headmistress of the school he chose was very progressive, and she exuded a calming aura that he wanted to be wrapped up in for the rest of his life. She had the strong conviction that even the most unstable mutants could become stable members of society and had a proven, if controversial, success rate of progressive integration. At her school she would make sure that the children who had affinities for fire could swim competitively, that girls who could kill with a touch were versed in self defense and little boys who could hurt with the masses could strip an engine to its silent components by the time they hit puberty. It was controversial at the time, because it was counterproductive to everything the mutant rights movement had fought and spilled blood for. Will’s mother, before she died, had dreams of her sensitive son being a great artist or musician, or an influencer of men - “for the better, naturally. We don’t want him being a cult leader’ - but while he always excelled at the practical side, he also excelled at the thing that made parents of empath children secretly terrified, that their child would overdose on the emotions of others, unable to emerge from the sea of their petty sadness, and never achieve the things that mutant society promises its youngest members - a future, any future at all.

 

The first time he took an engine apart in shop class, even the background neuroses of his teacher softened into just a background murmur. It wasn’t a power, or magic or even an imprint, just old fashioned talent, from the latin for a weight of gold. Something lovely and valuable that you have to earn.

 

* * *

 

He’s called away from his reverie and into the office. The doctor he sees isn’t his usual one, which fills him with trepidation. Instead it’s a pretty doctor on loan from the local mutant clinic for a few shifts, the kind of mutant who believes sincerely that she _understands_ , but always fails to. She looks at his notes and the history of letters from different specialists, the sticker in his file that doesn’t say beware but might as well do and clicks her tongue. When she finally puts them down, Will knows immediate that he’s going to get The Speech.

 

“I’m not sure I can be much help to you, Mr Graham. Especially as you have a history of getting into these situations despite all of the warning signs. If you will insist on putting yourself in the pathway of these kinds of feelings, then you have to accept the consequences. I can write you a script for your usual pills, but I implore you to see the light and stop relying on them to save you. They are not supposed to be used this way” 

“There is no side effects from long-term use” he interjects, tense and frustration bleeding into his voice.

She looks irritated, because while he is right technically by medicine and the mostly-human body he inhabits, he is not right by her morals. “You cannot medicate away your power. Even if it is medically safe, you know how wrong it is...considered. Your mutation is a gift you have to accept. Men must walk the path given to them.”

Despite holding his eyes for a few agonising seconds where he thinks she’ll ask him to leave, she nevertheless presses print, and purses her mouth as he takes the prescription and walks out of her office, into his car, then into the dispensary two towns over he knows will prescribe the pills without any moralising. His hands shake, but he is so truly grateful she didn’t exercise her legal right to refuse to prescribe to him as so many other doctors with sanctimonious concern oozing from them do, thrusting fistfuls of pamphlets on Proactive Care and Adult-Onset Mutation Support Groups at him, comfortable mutants who never had to worry about burning up with the fire of borrowed sadness. By the time he’s home, darkness has fallen and the village is just pinpricks of light against the background darkness and inward rush of the tide. He feels the closest thing to calm as he presses the tablets out of the blister pack and locks the rest away, the sorry packets lying next to his checkbook and gun inside the antique and very politically incorrect ‘omega-mutant proof’ safe, as if there could be a thing. Says a ritual goodbye to the drowned girl as he has all the ghosts that managed to linger until they became something like old friends, and swallows double what the packet indicates is the safe dose and burrows himself into the cocoon of blankets and the groove his body had made in the cheap mattress.

 

He sleeps for three days, but when he wakes up she isn’t there anymore. There are twelve messages from customers looking to pick up their repairs, each angrier than the last. He calls them back, protesting the flu, an excuse they accept from the roughness of his sleep-ruined voice. The edges of the medication help stop the creep of their anger and anxiety into the soft, sticky void of his mind. When the last one is placated, he rolls over and sleeps for another 12 hours, blissfully empty.

 

* * *

 

He troops down to the bay in the dark with only the light of his watch to guide him and is at the shop before dawn. He watches the sun rise over the cove with the ants back below his skin, but a full book of repairs is waiting for him, and so he throws himself into work as the ambient lights turn themselves off as the sun filters in through the rolled up doors. There is a bottle of bourbon he knows is from Dave sitting pretty on the ledger, and he tosses it in the drawer with the rest of his mistakes before cracking his knuckles and starting work.

 

It is a perfect day, observed out of the corner of his eye, with nothing but shades of blue stretching for miles. From the azure of sky to the dull cadet blue of the gulf, all was a calming empty stretch punctuated only with bits and pieces of wandering emotion from happy tourists or frowning fishermen with substandard catch.

 

It is while replacing a worn out part in an outboard that had more repairs than original parts and now has nothing more than a network of scar tissue and solder holding it together, a shadow stretched across the midday light, casting him into darkness.

The man was tall and well dressed, with shoes unused to walking on sand. He looked calm and collected and utterly out of place.

“Excuse me” he said, accent pleasantly foreign and smooth like a Hollywood villain in a better class of thriller, “my car seems to have broken down. Would you be able to help? The tide is coming in and I know that the salt water would not be good for it.”

Will looks out onto the beach and sure enough down the other end of the bay a gleaming European saloon car sat marooned several yards below the high tide mark. The water was only a few feet from its tyres. He nodded, got up and followed the stranger across the sands.

 

“How did you get your car on the beach?” Will asks as they walk together, impossible to avoid the question.

“I recently arrived here, I am here for the summer and was heading into town to pick up a week’s worth of supplies, which is why I took the car rather than walking the admittedly short distance. However, I underestimated the logistics; my car is wide, and the streets are narrow, and so it wasn’t until I was on the ramp onto the beach that I realised the roads had led me to the one place I would be able to turn it around. Naturally, I stopped to get out and admire the view, and then when I had got my fill, the car would no longer start. Perhaps it is better at enjoying the view than I”.

Will smiled with one side of his mouth and popped the hood to have a look. “I think you just have some sand where it shouldn’t be. I will need to give it a thorough clean, but I should be able to get it to my shop before the tide comes and ruins it further. If you help me get it back to the shop, that is. I’m the boat mechanic, but I promise I can fix any engine you bring to me.”

The stranger raised an eyebrow, “Technopath?”

“Just talented” Will replied, forcibly dismissively, reaching in to release the handbrake and rolling up his sleeves. “Lets start pushing, the tide always comes in faster than you think.”

 

The stranger is Hannibal Lecter, formerly of a metropolis far away, on a sabbatical for undisclosed reasons that even Will couldn’t fathom from the cloud of people that had collected to watch two men push a car across the sands. A surgeon, Will finds out later, when Hannibal hands him a business card so he could contact him when the car was rebuilt. The discreet registration mark in the corner said mutant in a careful way, but no mention of his power, or even his specialisation, unlike the list of therapies always listed on the left by the mutant doctors Will ends up seeing. Will has always been bad at picking up the specifics of people’s mutations but there is a frisson there, something that says that what is there might be interesting, maybe even compatible. Will pushes down the urge to ask, and pushes down his empathy to the best of his ability, the drugs still in his body making it sluggish and sleepy and easily bossed around. He promises to call Lecter in the next couple of days, once he’s cleared his backlog and seen to his car.

 

* * *

 

Before the town can settle back into its default sleepy innocence, the second murder of the summer happens. The local bank teller is killed and trussed up like he’s greeting his patrons, his belly cut open and stuffed with coins and his body papered over with $1 bills. He looked like a lesser-scaled capitalist, and the pictures, though more comical than truly gruesome, are everywhere, in the press, on the news in the front window of the hardware store, in the minds-eye of everyone who passes by him. Will looks at his weekly takings and puts them under his mattress and takes three pills without even having to think about it. An hour later, when they kick in and he feels safe, he realises that he was supposed to deliver Hannibal’s car to him that evening. He gets the call right on the third try and is impressed he manages to not slur too much when telling him he needs to come down and pick it up as soon as possible.

 

Hannibal arrives within twenty minutes, flushed from having obviously run down to the bay. He is vocally appreciative of the work done, and insists on cooking for Will the next night. Will finds himself agreeing in order to get him out of the door before he passes out, and when he feels the purr of the Jaguar slip away he curls up on the cot in the back room and sleeps the rest of the day away. He finds Hannibal’s number and address written in perfect script on top of his ledger the next morning, as well as a small package that turns out to be a perfectly presented smoke-cured bacon and mushroom sandwich with something creamy and rich and unctuous that makes him salivate. The sandwich is so carefully wrapped its still warm, and he eats it so fast his stomach lurches, but it does immediately take the screaming edge off his comedown.

 

* * *

 

 

Hannibal makes him dinner that seems comparable to the extravagant amount Will discovered he paid him to blow the cobwebs and salt air from his engine. When Will walks up to the headland he finds, half hidden, a low, beautiful villa languishing insouciantly next to the lighthouse. The inside is sumptuously decorated, very different to the fashionable holiday villa looks of spare white walls and clean minimalism or hyper-Mexicana. Instead, Hannibal’s kitchen is dark red and wood, with knives as decoration and chrome fittings edging the walls that feel like a menace against the traditional pointwork. The living space is full of leather and velvet furniture with billowing, gauzy curtains over the wide windows with their green shutters taking the edge off the heat.

 

The day is the first oppressively warm day of the year and the windows are all thrown open to the setting sun. Hannibal presents him with a fine veal steak so perfectly seasoned it could have been done by the fine sea air. It drips blood when he cuts into it and melts on the tongue in a way he’d thought impossible for meat to do, an act only possible in the pages of seduction fiction. There are frites, which soak up the blood and become both crisp and fluffy, a soft potato cloud upon his tongue. There is a sarcastic amount of salad, a nod to the concept of what magazines claim is healthy eating, but still just a few mouthfuls of perfectly balanced green to the richness of the meat, to refresh the palate and get it ready for satisfying its need for more. It is one of the finest meals Will has ever eaten.

 

They sit on the veranda after the indulgence of the meal, settling in large rattan armchairs with whisky and watch the sun set over the horizon. The whisky tastes of fresh peat and smoke and the clacking of the ceramic whisky stones are their soundtrack as they talk.

“I have been curious, Will.” Hannibal says as the sun becomes barely a sliver and night draws in. “You fixed my car, and from what I have heard you fix everything in the village from boats to televisions, but you are not a technopath. You are a mutant though, I must confess I can usually tell when I meet one of my species. Are you willing to tell me your power? I know it is highly inappropriate to ask, but I confess the alcohol has loosened my tongue and I find myself compelled to have an answer.”

Will waits a few moments until the sun slips finally below the horizon, and the days is over. Certain discussions are easier at night. He sighs and downs his drink and confesses: “Empathy. Gamma level.”

“I take it you aren’t in treatment” Hannibal states, rather than questions.

“I take pills. I stay away from people. I try not to use it. Just try to live a quiet life.”

Hannibal quietens, even down to his breathing. The only sound is the clink of the ceramic in his drink.

“If you are willing, and I honestly mean this as a gesture of opportunity and friendship, not as anything untoward, but I am qualified to provide brief counselling to gamma-level mutants. I have been considering training to provide more advanced treatment, and so at this point it would just be a friendly ear and a guiding voice through some mindfulness exercises, if you were to accept. I think it would be a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“All I want is to be alone.” Will says, staring out to sea.

“But we know how impossible it is to be truly alone, the kind of alone an empath with your power craves. I know you have enjoyed this evening though. My house is isolated, it is only myself and the fish in the ocean who can hear you right now. I am remarkably stable and able to keep my emotions controlled while we speak, though I can’t speak for the fish. Let me help you. Give me two sessions, and if its not working, I promise to say no more of it. You are always welcome in my kitchen, no matter how this goes. I prefer to cook for two, anyway.”

 

* * *

 

The first session is a disaster, but Will know’s it's not Doctor Lecter’s fault. The bay murderer struck again, brazenly slaughtering a tourist to leave her on the beach in a deck chair the day of the midsummer bonfire, perfectly stacked as if she were attempting to improve her tan beneath the moonbeams. When someone tried to rouse her, her head fell into the sand with exquisite comic timing and her limbs fell into a mess of puzzle pieces. She had been butchered, they wrote endlessly in the paper, following an old jointing pattern for long, slow cooking. Town burst into a riot of emotional response and overwrought headlines, and as a consequence, Will retreated into his medication and his emergency projects. Even through the multiple notices he had placed on every eye catching part of his house, the fridge, the bathroom mirror, on his alarm clock, the numbing pharmaceuticals made it so he barely remembered his appointment, and then turned up to Hannibal’s house in no state for anything, with a head full of borrowed emotions and native panic visibly squirming like trapped rats behind drugged eyes. The newspapers included sensational details, talk of the victim’s young children, her contributions to the community and her suddenly regretful ex-husband. He could see her in his eyes down to her tanlines and chipped pedicure. He could feel her plumping up the cushions in his mind, trying to make herself at home.

 

Hannibal tries to run through a visualisation exercise, then a relaxation exercise, but before he moves onto the mindfulness rundown, he gives up. Will lies limp as a puppet with its strings cut, an anachronistic picture of the laudanum addict on a plush velvet couch. Will expected to be left alone, or lectured the way other mutants always seem to believe they can, a twist on the ‘come to Jesus’ conversation for the generation who grew up with more righteousness than sense. Instead though, Hannibal just talks at him about everything sweet and clean and clear he can think of. When Will rouses enough, blinking the sleep and dryness from tired eyes, it is nearly midnight, and Hannibal bundles him into the back of his Jaguar, and drives him home.

 

* * *

 

A week later Hannibal rings the shop and asks if Will can service his car. The summer is usually the busiest time of year for him, but the murderer on the loose means fewer tourists are ruining their rented engines and requiring his services. He accepts, as it’s work and an excuse to try and salvage his reputation as something other as a fragile junkie who cannot control his power, even though he knows there is nothing functionally wrong with the Jaguar. He spends a few glorious hours tearing it apart and putting it back together so it growls even prettier than before, and when Hannibal comes down to collect it, it is easier than almost anything else for Will to let Hannibal talk him into doing another session.

 

The killer doesn’t hit that week, and Will doesn’t touch the pills even when he deals with an anxious client and feels the echoes of her distress at a failing fanbelt for days, even though it means his walls get a thrashing and the fish become even more nervous.

 

He remembers Hannibal’s house like a dream from his drugged out reverie. There are gaps, the kitchen and dining room clear and hyper-detailed but the rest of the rooms disjointed and unfamiliar, the decorations that seemed terrifying when blurring together from the influence now are revealed to be tasteful and soothing.

Hannibal welcomes him, and the house smells of fresh fish and summer promise. Dinner is for later, he is told, and a tall glass of something non-alcoholic and refreshing is poured for him. The smell of cut lemons and lemon balm floods his senses like cool water on a fresh burn.

They sit opposite each other this time, perched in semi-uncomfortable chairs, the subtext strong that this is to keep them both awake and alert so this session has the best chance of succeeding.

After a silence that borders on uncomfortable, Will asks, “Where shall we begin?”

“Why did you get your prescription for the pills in the first place?” Hannibal replies, as an opening question as cutting as a knife.

“I never had to have medication as a child. I went to a Maitland Method school and responded well to it, and anyway, my mutation was inconvenient but not anything I didn’t learn to live with. I coped for a long time with conventional coping mechanisms, but one day I was in a car crash. It was a pile up on the freeway with 50-something cars. I think around 7 people died, but I was trapped in my car, unhurt but unable to move for around 12 hours surrounded by people upset and stressed and terrified. I was 29. I was in a specialist mutant hospital for six months afterwards, and the only thing that gave me any reprieve was the drugs. They’re only supposed to be for a few weeks, and then I had to be weaned off them, but it turned out that the genie wouldn’t go back in the bottle. I was reclassified as a gamma mutant from a delta. My job, I was a traffic cop, they couldn’t make the adjustments to having a gamma on staff, and so I was given a substantial compensation payment and sent on my way. I used it to buy my shop from a man who was retiring, and a boat for myself, and support myself, food, rent my house, that kind of thing, until business picked up. There’s a sympathetic mutant doc in the next town, and he would give me prescriptions as and when I needed them, so long as I only used them for dealing with episodes, and not numbing the world away.”

 “It is unfortunately that drugs are so controversial in our society” Hannibal agrees. “The politics around there being a ‘cure’ for mutation sends a lot of people into a panic even over something designed to give relief from the extremes of mutation, and its why people like yourself suffer. What caused your most recent episode?”

“The first girl, the first victim of the bay killer. She was found in my buddy Dave’s fishing nets. He was fucked up over it, and kept trying to get me to go for a beer even though I said I couldn’t. In the end he just came round and gave me beers under false pretence, and told me what he saw. I think he needed to dump it all on me and didn’t care. He knows, and his wife’s a mutant, but she’s very conventional delta and maybe he doesn’t get how debilitating my problem is. But, honestly I think he believes the shit about empaths being able to take away your trauma. That we can take it away if you unload onto us. Anyway, I was haunted by the girl for a month before I went to get a new prescription. I exorcised her - don’t look at me like that - but now I’m finding it hard to wean myself off”.

 “It must be good to have a reprieve from worrying about conversations.” Hannibal says, face turning back to calm.

 “Yeah.” Will says, at a loss of what to say next, feeling wrung out from more talking than he normally does.

 

“We are not so different, you and I” Hannibal cuts in smoothly, luscious vowels warm with an impending speech. “We are both in unconventional careers for people of our disposition. We are both successful despite of it. It proves that mutation does not need to rule the lives of everyone in our situation. It is scary to think that the religions are wrong, that the politically correct opinion is not the only way to survive - and the simple truth that power is not always a gift from an almighty God.

A woman came to me, when I was still a surgeon. I worked in a conventional hospital but would occasionally see mutant patients through my practice. She had a power of hyper-flexibility that had spread through her bones as she got older, until they were almost rubber and she got around in an electric wheelchair. She wanted me to reinforce her skeleton, so she could be like her favourite super hero, I forget which one. She thought that maybe I could make her into a demigod. The woman had skipped the middle stage of her recovery, which would be to walk unaided. To go shopping without excessive pain. To be self-sufficient and no longer soil herself. She had missed that simple truth that she did not have to be special, because she already was in the language of our world. What was missing from her life was normality.”

 “You are…” Will said, slightly flummoxed from trying to read between the lines of Hannibal’s speech.

“I am not an empath like yourself. I am, well, putting it together I would be considered an antithesis to you. Its an old conceit, really though, when we are together, we are a balance that is rarely seen. It is why we work so well. It is a rare thing, to meet someone so perfectly opposite to me. It is unconventional to say so, but it is an honour.” He smiles broadly like it is the best thing in the world.

 

Will knows that it is not a good thing. An antithesis, an antiempath. Will had met a sympath, had been in a short lived relationship with one that had been his longest running relationship at a grand three months, and he’d met other sympaths as they often went into psychotherapy or acute mutant care wards, and their counselling was on the pathway as first line treatment for severe empaths and non-mutants who had suffered severe trauma. Sometimes people referred to them as opposites of empaths, although clinically they were recognised as a compatible disposition. Will had never met a psychopath before. The old world felt spiky as he held it in his mouth. Impolite. Sometimes the old words were more destructive than the new ones. Like emotional vampire. Like tainted. Like uncaring, uninhibited, unfeeling.

 

It strikes him suddenly that he can’t feel Hannibal’s emotions, that everything he thought he was picking up from him was what was writ large upon his face. The man was projecting at him to hide the truth that he was something dangerous to Will, something he’d been told to avoid. Ruin lies this way. Opposites do not attract. Physics isn’t chemistry.

 

Conventional teaching says that mutants each have their own weakness, that mutant society has always advised staying away from. Sometimes people can’t help working with someone who their power doesn’t work well with, but everyone is usually an adult about it, and Human and Mutant Resource departments can move people around to compensate. Mistakes still happen, but its rare. They used to happen a lot more before registration, before mutants emerged from the shadows. Generally, people of all stripes are aware of each other.

Hannibal is everything Will has been taught his whole life to stay away from, the kind of unfeeling antagonist to his internal protagonist who could spell his downfall by removing his boundaries. Empaths are documented to experience disorientation, loss of sensation, numbness, shock and succeptibility, often succumbing to recklessness themselves. There is a high chance of deaths among Empaths who spend large amounts of time with Psychopaths. He can’t remember the exact reason why in amongst the cacophony of his fear.

He stands in a panic and unthinkingly grabs Hannibal’s car keys from where he had left them on the side table and is down the hill in the car before he can even think or register Hannibal’s protestations in his terrified ears.

 

* * *

 

The day after Hannibal’s confession a thunderstorm opens over the bay. The rest of the county was bathed in perfect sunshine, but Andrew James had been dumped the day before, and that, coupled with the stress of the past week meant that the thick, violent droplets of his emotion turned the beach into a long, pockmarked crust lying over a mantle of warm dry sand beneath, sand that knew it was summer and was insulted by the rain.

Will had never loved the rain, whether caused by cold fronts or heartaches, but this storm entranced him, and so he spent hours that morning sat at the edge of his shopfront, no customers to break the spell, and let the ersatz nothingness roll over him.

 

Hannibal appeared out of nowhere an hour before sunset, drenched to the bone.

Will looked quickly away from him and tried to appear busy while inching away to put distance between them, trying to limit his contact. “Why did you come down? I have nothing to say to you. Its not right for you to be here.”

“You have my car.” Hannibal said, simply.

Will sighed, opened his drawer and threw Hannibal’s keys at him. They hit him squarely in the chest, and dropped into his waiting hands. He turned, and moved to storm away but Hannibal caught his wrist and held him.

“You are here, on the edge of town during the thunderstorm magic of a lovelorn teenager. You are taking solace from his suffering. You let his mutation into your world, but not mine? We cannot help what we are to each other, no more than Mr James could bring us a sunny day. You and I have spent so long being talented that we have forgotten what it is like to let our mutation be part of us, and we have stopped questioning the prejudices our society still holds against us. Please, take a minute to stop fighting and stop letting superstition and learned prejudice rule your mind and feel what this connection, this serendipitous circumstance of our meeting, actually means.”

The look on Hannibal’s face was barely emotional, but something about it made Will close his eyes despite his better wishes, and do what he was asked. Hannibal’s hands came up to his face, shockingly intimate, in the lover’s embrace, the pose you take when you really take someone’s power into you.

Hannibal was not exactly calming, but certainly not agitating. He gave off no describable impression at first, did not break down any of the walls in his mental house like he had feared. Will’s mind was blank, but not in the way the drugs or meditation left him turned off or glitchy, not the way the focus of work made him muted and monosyllabic. There was a voice in there, and it was his own, the voice he’d never been able to hear properly before.

Hannibal was warm, a blanket, an oasis, the hug of a mother whose magic he’d never really known. He didn’t realise that he was crying until Hannibal brushed the tears from his face.

“Come outside” Hannibal said quietly, hands still touching him in the language of lovers that says ‘promise’ and ‘possession’ and ‘forever’. “You can feel it all you like and it will just be more tears for the day of rain”.

And so, standing in the driving rain, Will gave in, pushed as close as possible and sucked in the feeling, the smell and got caught in the feedback loop of their complementary powers feeding on each other. He smiled, looked up and felt the glimmer of something he couldn’t put a word to. The feeling felt like pure light, like the fog had lifted, and it was with only body language that he _knew_ , and so he kissed Hannibal there outside his shop, both of them leaning into it and completing the loop. They stood there kissing until Will was as drenched as Hannibal was, and throughout it all Will’s mind sang a single note, pure and clean like a bell, and the rain began to fall sweetly for acceptance, the final stage of grief.

 

Hannibal walked him home once the rain had subsided to a fine mist that covered everything with dew, and put him into a bed mysteriously warm for the cool of the day, a whispered endearment the last thing Will remembered before dropping into the blackness of sleep.

 

* * *

 

Will wakes up and feels the calmness of the pre-dawn darkness in a way different from all the other early starts. The sun may still be far below the horizon, but there is a glimmer of the beginning of sunrise, the birds are going mad, and the griefstorm of the lovelorn has passed. The bay is cool and mirror-calm, a promise of a perfect morning. He dresses impulsively for a day on the dory, and walks down the silent winding streets to collect his fishing gear from the shop, intending to put off his opening until later and enjoy the silence out on the water. Once he reaches the shop, he impulsively texts Hannibal and puts the coffee machine on, staring in anticipation while the percolator spits and judders hot coffee into its jug. Hannibal responds before he can sneak a cup, and Will sees his own smile reflected in the tarnished chrome fascia. He does the morning tasks of shop ownership, from sweeping the floor to making a list of stock to order, and then when he pokes his head out of the door, Hannibal is waiting for him, holding two coffees and an insulated bag that he calls lunch. He is dressed impeccably but deliberately casually, like what an expensive outdoorsman magazine would think would be appropriate for a fishing trip, but at least it is functionally appropriate, and he looks so handsome Will can’t help but feel a little weak.

On perfect days like today, he prefers to row rather than use the outboard motor so as to use the quietest method possible to get into the middle of the silent bay so as not to wake it up. Hannibal insists that he rowed in college, the mental image of which is ever so distracting, and so they each take one oar and with easily found synchronicity they head out into the bay.

Will shows Hannibal how to tie his lure on, how to attach the bait and how to cast. Every movement seems to soft and expectant, infused with sexual tension, heightened by the extreme privacy and the previous day’s revelations. He finds his throat dry and torn up without saying much at all. He drinks deep when Hannibal offers the canteen, unbidden, and hopes it will settle his head.

They sit back to back, finding easy excuses to lean against each other and to touch as much as possible. Hannibal’s bare forearm presses against Will’s bare forearm with the co-conspirators of rolled up sleeves. Eyes catch each other looking at lips and the open throat of a shirt. The morning chill burns off quickly.

Hannibal sets a match to the whole powder keg of sexual tensions by touching Will's hand, running his fingers up the salt roughened skin of Will’s arm. He kisses the back of his neck with the lightest of touch, trails his fingers over the side of the boat, drawing a line in the water and repeats his previous caress with cool fingers. He follows the shudder of Will’s nervous system with his lips and fingers, trails the paths of the nervous movement up his spine, placing kisses against the hair at his nape. Everything Hannibal does is small and light and so far on the side of not enough, running his cool fingers lightly along the edge of Will’s collar, kissing beneath his ear until he has taken him apart with just the pads of his fingertips and the softest edges of his lips. He hasn’t even taken his other hand off the rod when Will turns and kisses him properly, chases the coolness from Hannibal’s mouth and demeanor. There is a splash as the rod falls overboard and Hannibal grabs him with both hands and new fierceness.

Will leads by example and feels Hannibal’s strength bend to him. There isn’t enough room for two on his boat to do all that much but sit too close, and so Will takes it to its logical conclusion and drag-shifts Hannibal to the centre so that gravity remains on their side and seats himself in Hannibal’s lap. Wraps his hands in his hair and looks. Looks at the finest lines on his face, at his cheekbones and fine brow and feels them, feels the texture of his hair and the freshest breeze around them and the silence that feels fresh and clean inside his head, cobwebs blown all away. Hannibal is still and smiling and Will feels nothing from him, no secrets and no lies bubbling like a witches cauldron. He kisses him, desperately happy.

 

It is difficult, but not impossible to have sex on a dory, but that morning everything fell into place. Hannibal’s broad hands undressed him as much as felt necessary, stroking up his sides beneath his shirt, the way he undid buttons and touched Will until he was nearly going insane, then covered Will’s body with his own and ground into him one single perfect time, looking completely undone and unravelled.

Hannibal gets his pants off and his fingers into something slick and body-warm from being in his pocket for a morning. The sun continues its ascent above the horizon as Will throws his head back as Hannibal strokes him from the inside out, coaxing him open and gaping and stretched around his fingers. Hannibal leans back and guides his cock in and braces his hand and lets Will take his pleasure, rides him until the boat is tilting dangerously in the water and sending ripples around them that stretch out all the way back to the village. Will stops being so vigorous and takes to stirring and rising just enough to get a bit of friction, watching Hannibal’s face for all its tells, feeling everything properly for the first time.

Will’s sex life was dismal and isolated. His few attempts at relationships were with sympaths who understood but didn’t understand, and still projected during sex enough to throw his rhythm off, either consumed with a raucous lust or a distressing low self-confidence.

Hannibal’s yell of orgasm literally echoes off the bay, and Will wished fervently he could do the same, let their echoes run away together and find a new life somewhere, running free. Instead he covers his mouth and whimpers as he covers his hand with his release and slumps down, Hannibal sliding out of him obscenely.

 

They slip over the side and into the bay, the cool water exquisite on overheated skin.

 

* * *

 

Once Will got a taste of his and Hannibal’s reaction he could barely stop long enough to go back to his shop. Its not just the sex, though they fuck everywhere they can. It is the feeling, the pure revelation of the reality of love and the addiction he has to it.

The summer months still blur into an erotic montage that lives behind his eyelids as he works, but in the best way, for once his empathy a conspiratorial friend rather than a jealous enemy. He never had been able to have a complicated, non-drugged sexual relationship and so the breadth of feeling, with the emotions that come along with it were a revelation. He gets caught in the memory of it multiple times, sitting in Hannibal’s lap in front of the roaring fire in one of the leather armchairs big enough to house a small family, the leather slick with sweat despite the chill of the sea air. He and Hannibal stealing a witching hour tryst on the beach at midnight under an enormous full moon, the fine gulf sand a masochistic third party in their pleasure. The thrill of nearly being caught when Hannibal surprises him after he rebuilds an engine and once he sees just how Will looks covered in engine grease he literally growls and begs Will to take him roughly over his workbench, the black smears of engine grease looking just gorgeous against Hannibal’s lily white skin, the force of their enthusiastic fucking knocking spare engine parts onto the floor with clangs and crashes like the emphatic percussion of a great symphony. They spend days in bed together, lolling indiscriminately between Hannibal’s beautiful big bed with the thousand count sheets and Will’s rough fishermen’s bed with interesting pieces of driftwood acting as ballast, trading places when they tired of one way or another. Hannibal takes it so beautifully, his long fingers and dancer’s legs beautifully splayed in the height of pleasure. He has a strength that he longs to relinquish and let Will take over. The danger of being together was heightened by the danger fucks they entertain, the one that sticks most in mind was where Will sucked Hannibal off long and slow as they cruised down the freeway, until it was too much, until they pulled over and managed to steam up the car with the intensity of their desire for each other. Will put gouges in the fine leather with his fingernails when he came that made Hannibal crinkle his brow endearingly.

Then there’s the food. Will had always had simple tastes. Hannibal knocked down the walls of comfort his taste buds lived in and introduced him to things he’d never even thought of eating. Organ meat was a treat for the dogs growing up, but Hannibal had a weakness for it, for kidneys in tagliatelle with roasted cherry tomatoes bursting on the tongue, delicate liver in pomegranate molasses and heavy with aromatic herbs, and slivers of sliced tongue in summer salads. The summer is hot and humid but Hannibal is a cook for all seasons. He makes warm summer salads indolent with lentils and pomegranates and stews with szechuan peppers that numb and chill the mouth when you go to douse the heat with water. It is an incredible sensory journey, and maybe it was the preoccupation of the severity of his power, but Will has never been so actively engaged in pleasure since meeting Hannibal. It feels forbidden and sinful. It makes him squirm.

Will knows he is being reckless. He checks daily that he isn’t showing the textbook signs of a negative reaction to being around his antithesis. He feels clearer and more observant than ever before, the distractions stripped away and thinking clearly for the first time. However, he doesn’t report the interaction with a psychopath to his doctor, like the guidelines say, but he tells them he has no need for the pills, and they praise him for it. Its a cheap shot, but he has always had a hand in his care. He ignores the daily text message that tells him that a potentially incompatible mutant is living within 1 mile of him. He laughs to himself when it pings in daily at 2AM, usually when Hannibal is wrapped around him in exhausted slumber. He unsubscribes from the service once it starts to bother him like a loose tooth. He feels adolescent, like it doesn’t know his life. Like everything he’s been taught has been a lie.

 

And meanwhile bodies stack up in the village while Will feels nothing but what he wants to feel. It is the best summer of his life.

 

* * *

 

In July, the woman who ran the delicatessen and her husband both go missing within a week of each other. Their bodies turn up a few days later, in a lovers embrace, but missing their hearts.

The press had moved in and spent their days speculating about every aspect of the summer of death. Much was made of the lack of a pattern. There was nothing consistent that linked the victims. While all were mutants, their powers were disparate. Their sex lives were quotidian. Half of them were barely on nodding terms with each other. Much was made of how this small village seemed so enlightened, so well integrated compared to what was still the impression of the south. An example to the rest of the country, barring the murders. The dead were by turn well respected in the village or just merely background characters who no one had any strong opinion about.

The village was a ghost town by August. Seven deaths in three months and no tourists meant even those untouched by the devastation had to leave to find summer employment elsewhere. The police, federal agencies and superhero organisations were spilling out of every house, dusting for prints, pounding the pavements and sending out waves and waves of contradictory powers trying to track down any evidence of the killer. The people left were interviewed nearly daily. Will worked his hours, which included endless conversations with other mutants who asked impolite questions and Feds who spoke in euphemisms and with their hands. He then returned to Hannibal’s house in the evening to escape the cacophony of emotions that ran through the village at all hours.

 

* * *

 

 

A town meeting was called for the residents who remained. The press and law enforcement were politely asked to let the town decide what to do, and that minutes from the meeting would be posted. The Mayor was firm, but polite. This wasn’t anything to do with the investigation, but instead just a meeting of local residents who are concerned, and want to talk it out without being under the microscope of law enforcement. A jammer from the next town was hired to keep prying eyes out of the hall.

The hall itself was small, which made the atmosphere feel more packed, like it was a proper town hall meeting for a fully formed community, rather than skeletal remains trying to discover who flayed them.

“We know it is someone in this room”, the Mayor said, her eyes clear but hands trembling. “We have always been a town that was open and welcoming to mutants, and we’re an old town of old families, many of whom have mutated. Southern hospitality isn’t the half of it, we know ours are ours, and people deserve to be safe. Whatever the reason, and I’m sure its a good one, this need to stop now. If anyone can shed light on who is doing this, please, we beg of you, we will all protect you. We just need this carnage to end. We need everything to go back to normal”

There’s a nervous quiet in the hall, everyone waiting politely for someone to speak, pet theories hiding on their tongue, waiting for one person to open the floodgates and enable them all to speak.

“Will, the boat mechanic, is an empath” a voice Will doesn’t know shouts out, breaking the silence. “He might be able to sense the guilt of the murderer, if they’re in the room”. All eyes turn to him, bright and curious with the gossip and possibility of the tension finally breaking.  

Hannibal tenses next to him, going into a protective mode and Will shakes his head, beginning to deny it. He is tired, though. Even newly balanced the summer had been difficult. If it could go back to normal, even if he was consumed by the emotion, now would be the best time to try it. He has Hannibal now, to bring him back from the edge.

“I can..try”, he concedes. He knows that if someone was that guilty he’d have tasted it on them weeks ago, when it started, but he needs to try, to see if the critical mass of expectation and multiple murders would have made a difference.

He closes his eyes and casts out for the spike of guilt, the dark metallic taste of shiftiness or the cold sadness of shame. Hannibal, seated next to him, holds his hand for support. Will slides it off, patting it and whispers to him that he’s fine. His mind can feel none of the normal emotions in the room, just the background level of salt-tinged sadness at lost friends, the warm burn of suspicion of an empath, and the worry that grabs the throat that they might be next. There isn’t anything there that stands out as even slightly suspicious. No happiness, no pride, not even the pinprick of a Wartenberg wheel along the spine that feels like anticipation. He sighs loudly, frustrated, and feel the ripple cast across the crowd like a pebble on a silent pond.

 “I’m sorry.” he says. “There’s nothing there”.

There’s a hush of disappointment. Then a voice pops up and says “Maybe he is the murderer”. All heads turn, and it is Dave, his former friend, the one who started him on the path that brought him to Hannibal. Dave stands up and literally points the finger at him like a character from a courtroom drama and accuses him in front of all in attendance and all the gods watching. He spits, bright red with the effort of public speaking. Will feels Hannibal winding up like a spring next to him, and tries to comfort him with his unspoken gestures.

“Now, Dave, Will has an alibi”, the mayor says.

“We all have an alibi, Pamela. That’s why we’re here. We’re here because no one is being caught through conventional methods. There are powerful mutants in this room and the town has been crawling with feds and supers since the start of the fucking summer, and yet someone keeps killing people who are our own. And they haven’t a fucking clue! First they think its someone who hates mutants. Then they think its a mutant. Then they think its someone from out of town, so they put up a checkpoint, and then murders keep happening. There’s no pattern and its not personal. We are supposed to be protecting our own. Nothing like this happened before we started selling property to people outside of the core families.”

“Shut up, Dave” Pamela snaps. “We are not here to entertain your conspiracy theories again. This was a bad idea, but it was worth a shot. Everyone should go home. I’ll go speak to the captain.”

 

* * *

 

In the aftermath of the town hall meeting, somehow, among the hundreds of special talents and trained investigators and in the cold light of morning, the killer manages to strike again for the last time, by taking his own life. He was found by his wife the morning after they returned from the meeting, and neighbours reported that they had a fight. Dave had strung himself up with a noose made from his own fishing net, bright red and angry and spit-speckled even in death. A confession was daubed on the wall. It was all self-inflicted. The handwriting matched. There wasn’t a trace of another person, even down to the impression on the dust motes. 

Will saw the crime scene, made himself face it to close the circle of the summer. When he woke to someone banging on his door, needing to rule him out as a suspect, however perfunctory in an obvious suicide, instead of just fleeing to Hannibal’s or taking his boat out into the silence of the gulf, he went to take in the dramatic irony, the perfect crime scene, to observe everything carefully placed in Dave’s shed that implicated him in the murders.

When he stepped into the shed, with the pools of blood collected like tidal pools in rock formations, the circumstances of the whole summer fell into place.

He went outside to be sick, not from the sight, but from the knowledge that only one person would have known to do it, the person who felt no guilt at the murders he committed, the person who Will could never read. Dave was a clumsy fool who couldn’t eat a sandwich without getting most of it down himself. The person who killed was the kind of person who could eat soup without a napkin, who had a penchant for organ meat and knew how to make it appeal to the meat-and-potatoes set, who was perfectly composed and appropriate in every situation. Will, even in the days when he was a cop, never thought that he’d be so close, so entwined with murder without seeing it. Instead, he’d spent a summer being reckless with the one who had orchestrated everything that’d brought Will to his knees in the first place.

He knew he should go to one of the hundreds of authority figures milling around, talking into headsets and flickering out to tell superiors that there is a confession, to call off the search, but instead he turned on his heels and walked. He walked up to the villa in the shade of the lighthouse as if in a unwaking, disconnected dream. He wasn’t surprised to find that it empty and the Jaguar gone. He falls, exhausted and empty, his strings cut and frayed, into the oblivion of the late summer sunshine.

 

When he comes to, he is in the mutant wing of the Baton Rouge General Hospital, bleary eyed and clumsy as he comes out of sedation, and the police captain himself is telling him that Doctor Lecter left at dawn, telling the checkpoint he needed to see a nearby patient who was in crisis, and had since vanished.

 

* * *

 

EPILOGUE

 

It is the best part of a decade later, a period of time that for Will Graham contained endless months in rehab having his brain reprogrammed and weaned off the debilitating effects of an parasite power, followed by a course of cutting edge drugs and a lot of guilt and isolation. He retrained, rebuilt his life, was the poster boy and subject of fawning articles on the unique metamorphosis of his power profile over the years. And so it is Forensic Special Agent Will Graham of the Mutant Behavioural Unit at the FBI who runs into Doctor Hannibal Lecter once again, rather than the wise old boat captain he’d expected to be at this age.

The department is short-staffed as usual thanks to government cuts, and so against protocol, Will is dispatched to interview a person of interest without proper checks, and so has no idea who the suspect is until he steps into the interview room and stops short, mesmerised.

Hannibal is not a formal suspect, merely a curiosity to the department. He’s a tenuous link, if nothing else. It is ironic that the MBU didn’t cross-reference its own power profile against those of its suspects.

Will falls under Hannibal’s spell almost immediately. The cool calmness that took years to disengage, like a drug bound to his neurons but never entirely deactivated, fired up again, the familiar joyful possessive ache of an old addiction kicking in. He feels his phone vibrate against his thigh, alerting him too late of the proximity of a dangerous mutant.

“Stop it, Hannibal” Will ground out between teeth clenched in effort to resist the pull.

Hannibal looked up from inspecting his nails. “I could sense you ten blocks away, Will. It was quite a shock”.

Will tried to exert his own power, but failed miserably, feeling the old calmness and fake clarity spread over him.

“There is no point trying to resist it. This is natural, Will. This is something as natural as the rain, it is the natural order of things. We are two halves of one being, and so these things will always happen, as long as I desire it to. I am not in the habit of holding myself back these days”.

“Is that why you’re still killing?” Will grits out, ignoring everything in the previous statement for the moment for self preservation.

Hannibal shrugs. “Much like the end of the summer, it is the dying before the spring. I must confess I had to restock my larder for the long winter.”

Will laughs, incredulous. “So do you kill because you think you’re a force of nature or because you’re a squirrel? The enlightened psychopath who doesn’t believe in grand gestures or super-forces or a tiny mammal that hides in tree trunks?”

Hannibal stepped closer, and then the tension hits breaking point and Will feels like he is no longer in his body. Tears well in his eyes from the sheer effort of staying upright.

“Come with me” Hannibal says, voice deep with longing and passion that almost feels real. “Remember how it was. Remember how perfect we were together. Remember how you felt, being with me. How alive you truly were.”

Will can’t help but remember it, but he forces himself to keep his eyes open. “I never noticed the rain, before you.” he concedes. “But you were bad for me, I was ruined from you. I was never supposed to be that person”, he chokes out without thinking, a nonsensical collection of phrases had anyone else been listening. With a cry of pain he wrenches himself as best he can away from the burn of Hannibal’s touch, a touch that he craves beyond all else.

Hannibal smiles, and looks every inch of the natural force he claims to be. “Neither of us are heroes, Will. Ours has always been a love story between two villains. The love story no one ever tells. We’re supposed to walk between the raindrops, until hubris brings us down.”

“I’m not the villain.” Will protests.

“Oh Will”, Hannibal says, stepping close enough now that Will can feel his breath on his lips, “When will you realise I always was?”

With a swift movement, Will feels Hannibal’s lips on him, and the moment before the weight of the kiss knocks him unconscious, he feels the full power of their union, the blunt-edged weapon of their powers interacting in full, with neither of them holding back or trying to control it. When he comes to, Hannibal is long gone, but his mind feels different, like Hannibal had left an impression on Will’s mind like the Lichtenberg fractal figure from a lightning strike on bare skin. An indelible sign of change. He feels calmness, the taste of rainwater in his mouth and the warmth of the summer sun in the gulf and smiles, despite himself.

**Author's Note:**

> So this started because I wanted to write Will and Hannibal fucking in a boat. Then I wanted to write Magical Realism. Then for some reason my magical realism was turning into Magic Powers as Disabilities/Discriminatory Factors, then it just made sense to become a psudo-X Men AU.  
> My knowledge of the Marvel universe is very patchy, and so I use some terminology from the series, but have cast it all forward where the struggles of the mutant rights fight are if not over, but in a kind of truce, or at least happening elsewhere. I was interested in the more quotidian mutants, and how their lives were in a post-registration, modern solutions world.
> 
> The title's from ["I was doing all right"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb2JBNiW8Gk) by George and Ira Gershwin.
> 
> A thousand thanks to [Cambusmore](http://cambusmore.tumblr.com) for reading through it and being generally amazing, and to [Jen](http://pucewarrior.tumblr.com) for entertaining my 'WHY WONT THEY JUST FUCK IN A BOAT' messages even though its not her fandom.
> 
>  
> 
> [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com)


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